Apparatuses of the above mentioned type for releasably holding a pipe or the like are known, in which each clamp element has a sloping or inclined surface that cooperates with an opposed sloping or inclined surface, in such a manner so that a vertical or axial actuation motion is transformed into a horizontal or radial motion component of the clamp element, which in turn exerts a radial clamping force component onto the pipe that extends through the apparatus. Such apparatuses or devices are used, for example in the field of offshore oil drilling technology, in order to hold and support pipes such as drill pipes from an offshore oil drilling platform. In this regard, a pipe string is assembled from many individual pipe segments that are coupled with one another at their ends by respective mating threaded or other rotational couplings. Namely, a drilling string or pipe string is assembled by successively lowering a pipe segment, then holding that pipe segment while screwing the next successive pipe segment onto the preceding pipe segment, and then again lowering the growing pipe string in order to thereafter screw on the next pipe segment. This procedure requires an apparatus for holding each pipe segment while the next pipe segment is screwed on, and then releasing the pipe segment in order to allow the pipe string to be lowered.
A representative example of the known prior art is disclosed in the published German Patent Application DE 10 2012 005 794 and the related US Patent Application Publication US 2013/0025847. While the apparatus disclosed therein is useful and effective for its purposes, further developments, alternatives and/or improvements have been made by the inventors in the present application.